Template Letter to ask your own questions re: Census 2011..from a bloke called Dave..
Posted: March 9, 2011 by Ms.Something-Else in Uncategorized
2

Ms Jil Mateson, C.E.O.

Office for National Statistics

Government Buildings

Cardiff Road

Newport

South Wales

NP10 8XG

Notice of Conditional Acceptance and Request for Clarification

Dear Ms Matheson,

I write in response to the Census Form.

I must admit to being a little confused, it was my understanding that the census was instigated as a simple numerical count of the population; however, the information required in this census form far exceeds this mandate.

I am happy to complete this census form subject to receipt of clarification of the following points.

What law requires me to complete the census?
From where does the Office for National Statistics derive the lawful authority to demand private information?
Is there a limit to invasion of privacy?
Is the Office for National Statistics lawfully authorised to demand Private property?
How can we be penalised for failure to provide information?
Are there any circumstances whereby security agencies may access census information?
Since census data be requested by law enforcement, can I not answer so as to not to incriminate myself?
Since every government database has been hacked, leaked, lost or compromised in some fashion, how can the Office for National Statistics claim data security with any confidence?
Is the Office for National Statistics responsible for mishandled data?
10. What evidence do you have that I am a United Kingdom Resident?

11. Can you confirm or deny that the census data will be handled by an American Arms Manufacturer Lockheed Martin?

12. Can you confirm or deny that all U.S. companies are subject to the Patriot Act which allows the U.S. Government full access to any data in that company’s possession?

13. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that “additional contractual and operation safeguards” have been put in place to address concerns about the possibility of the US Patriot Act being used by US intelligence services to gain access to data – please list these contractual and operational safeguards.

14. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that only UK/EU owned companies will have access to personal census data – please confirm or deny that there may be UK/EU companies that are subsidiaries of US corporations that may circumnavigate the assurances provided by the Office for National Statistics and the contract between Lockheed Martin UK and so allow access to personal census data under the US Patriot Act.

15. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that independent checks by an “accredited UK security consultancy” of both physical and electronic security are carried out for ONS – please provide;

a) the name of the accredited UK security consultancy;

b) provide references that confirm their accreditation as well as;

c) details of the body with whom they are accredited.

16. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that 1,500 jobs have been “created” by the award of the contract to Lockheed Martin UK. Please provide details of;

a) how many of these jobs will exist on completion of the contract;

b) what percentage of these jobs have been given to the long-term unemployed;

c) what percentage of these jobs have been given to disabled people and,

d) what percentage of these jobs are given to other than UK citizens and,

e) what checks were made to ensure that they have the right to work in the UK (e.g. a Passport, a Visa or work permit for non-nationals).

17. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that 1,500 jobs have been “created” by the award of the contract to Lockheed Martin UK. Provide details of;

a) the training that has been provided to these 1,500 new employees to ensure that security measures are understood and met;

b) the rights that employees have to request time off for study or training, i.e. ‘time to train’;

18. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated “the contract has created around 1,500 jobs in the UK”. Provide details of:

a) what background checks have been carried out to ensure compliance with rules governing “security related jobs”;

b) details of the equal opportunities policies pertaining to the pre-employment checks as required by Employment law;

c) details of the rights and benefits of those being employed for the duration of the contract; and

d) the details of any severance package applicable to those staff who will lose their job at the end of the contract;

e) the rights offered to staff under the “flexible working rule”;

f) if flexible working includes the provision to “work from home”, what additional safeguards are in place to ensure the integrity and security of the personal census data under such circumstances;

g) the benefits offered to staff for maternity and paternity leave during the course of the contract;

h) confirmation or denial that the ONS conform to the “working time limit” requirements under Employment Law;

i) confirm under what conditions a contract of employment may be changed;

agreement between the ONS and the employee,
collective agreement, or
by implication.
19. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that the contract was awarded by ONS to Lockheed Martin UK as it “offered the best value for money” in an “open procurement scheme” carried out “under European Law”. Please provide,

a) details of how Lockheed Martin UK offered the best value for money by providing a table of the results of the tendering process;

b) details of the open procurement scheme used and,

c) the European Law under which the procurement scheme was carried out.

20. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated that a “number of specialist companies” are being used by ONS to “provide specific services for the census”. Please provide;

a) details of the specialist companies being used and

b) the specific services being offered by those companies.

21. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated “the contract has created around 1,500 jobs in the UK”. Please provide the following;

a) which agency was used for the criminal records checks (CRB) on each of these staff;

b) the net cost per CRB check per head;

c) provide the registration number that the ONS has with the Criminal Records Bureau.

22. In a Press Briefing dated 14 January 2011 it is stated “the contract has created around 1,500 jobs in the UK”. Please state how the data protection issues of these staff and their “secure employment records” are to be stored in compliance with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998.

23. Can you confirm or deny that the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 section 39 subsection 4 would allow disclosure of personal information to any and/or all of the following:

a) The 56 geographical and 8 non-geographical UK Police Forces and in particular the Devon and Cornwall Police who are currently owned by the corporation known as International Business Machines (IBM).

b) The three UK Intelligence Agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ).

c) The Department for Work and Pensions.

d) Private investigator working for the Department for Work and Pensions to hunt down alleged benefits cheats?

h) The Serious Organised Crime Agency (either for domestic investigations into Serious Crimes, or for these and also for minor investigations if requested by a Foreign Law Enforcement agency under Mutual Legal Assistance treaties.

Please provide your response in the form of a Statement of Truth, sworn under penalty of perjury and upon your full commercial liability within seven (7) days of receipt of this notice, I respectfully return your census form until such time as these conditions are met.

If I do not receive such a response conforming to the above criteria within, it will be deemed a tacit agreement by your acquiescence that this census is unlawful and that I have no obligation to participate.

Sincerely without malice, ill will, vexation or frivolity,

<yourname>: of the <familyname> Family_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Patty Winsa
Staff Reporter
A former leader of Saskatchewan’s Green Party has been found guilty of breaching Canada’s census law, despite Ottawa’s decision to scrap the mandatory long-form version.

A Saskatchewan judge ruled Thursday that Sandra Finley, 61, was guilty of not filling out her long-form census from 2006.

The Conservatives made the questionnaire voluntary last June, but the Saskatoon resident could still face three months in jail with a $500 fine.

The government made the change after arguing the lengthy census questions were intrusive and that prosecution and jail were too forceful. The move prompted complaints from non-profit agencies, civil servants and the public. StatsCan chief Munir Sheikh resigned in protest.

Finley, who led the Green party from 2006 to 2008, says she has written to the federal government for years to protest the outsourcing of the census to Lockheed Martin. In 2003, the federal government contracted out census collection to the company.

“I’ve been in conversation with the government since 2003 saying it’s not smart to outsource part of the census work,” says Finley.

Statistics Canada began sending her warning letters about prosecution, but Finley says, “I wasn’t scared. I just believe that what they’re doing is very wrong.”

She was charged by the federal crown in 2008 with refusing to complete the census under Section 31 of the Statistics Act, says Steve Seiferling, a privacy lawyer in Saskatoon.

As a Non Compliance Officer (NCO) you will be paired with a Non Compliance Assistant (NCA) to investigate census refusals, this is where people have refused to complete their census form as required by law. You will be dealing with members of the public who may be resistant to your requests and you will need to be able to manage confrontational situations. The work involves knocking on doors, talking to householders and, if they persist in refusing to complete a census questionnaire, you will conduct a refusal process which will include formal "Interview Under Caution". The address locations may be widespread over a large geographical area and you will need to locate and travel to these, so you will be working outside and travelling for the majority of your day - moving between addresses with the possibility of having to climb stairs. You are normally required to carry out your duties between the hours of 9am to 8pm Monday to Friday and 10am to 4pm on Saturday. As you are working in a pair you will be required to agree your working pattern with your partner, a mobile phone will be provided for your use. There may be instances when you are asked to work outside of these hours.

Period of Employment

26/04/2011 to 19/08/2011

Working Pattern

Full time (37 hours per week).

Salary

From £14.55

Job Description

Download job description
Recruitment Timetable

Recruitment Process

Timescale

Recruitment Campaign live - Roles live on the site and candidates able to apply

January 2011

Application Form The 1st stage of the application process is to complete the application form.

04/02/2011

Interview - Short-listed candidates will be invited to complete a telephone interview. Interviews will be available at a range of times including days, evenings & weekends.

Late February / early March

Conditional Offer and pre employment enquires - Candidates are required at this stage to send in photocopies of ID documents and a passport sized photo. References will be sought at this stage.

Offer and contract of employment - Once classroom training has been completed a contract of employment will be issued and new starters will be required to commit to terms and conditions of a Census Confidentiality Undertaking.

April 2011

Dates of Employment

26/04/2011 - 19/08/2011

Back_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Stolen information from RSA Security may have been used to hack into Lockheed Martin's secure servers, say sources. (Source: RSA Security)

Lockheed claims information on its fighter projects and government-contracted IT storage was NOT stolen. The company says it quickly countered the "sophisticated" attack.
Company claims fighter project schematics and hosted government information were not leaked

Over a week has passed and Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), the U.S. government's top information technology services provider, was hacked. The attack has been characterized as a "fairly subtle", yet "significant and tenacious" attack on servers at its massive Gaithersburg, Maryland data center, located not far from the company headquarters in Bethesda.

As details emerge the attack is appearing more and more like it was lifted out of a spy movie or Tom Clancy novel. The hackers appeared to have gained entry using information stolen in a separate, even more audacious attack of one of the world's highest profile security firms.

I. RSA Sec. Breach -- Prelude to the Lockheed Martin Attack?

Back in March hackers gained access to RSA Security's servers. RSA Sec. takes its name from the last initials of founders Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, three top cryptographers. The trio's popular public-key cryptography algorithm shares the same name -- RSA.

At the time of the RSA Sec. intrusion, the company commented that despite the fact that it believed information was stolen, the company did not believe customer information or the security of the company's software products were not comprised. Yet, they did advise clients to follow online advice to safeguard themselves against possible fallout from the data loss.

The attack on RSA was described as "extremely sophisticated".

Sources close to Lockheed point to compromised RSA SecurID tokens -- USB keychain dongles that generate strings of numbers for cryptography purposes -- as playing a pivotal role in the Lockheed Martin hack.

II. Damage Control

Hackers are believed to have entered Lockheed Martin's servers by gaining illegitimate access to the company's virtual private network (VPN). The VPN allowed employees to connect over virtually any public network to the company's primary servers, using information streams secured by cryptography.

With the RSA tokens hacked, though, those supposedly secure VPN connections were compromised.

Lockheed says that it detected the attack "almost immediately" and warded it off quickly. The company has since brought the VPN back online, but not before "upgrades" to the RSA tokens and adding new layers of security to the remote login procedure.

III. What Was Lost?

At this point the question on everyone's mind likely is "What was lost?"

Lockheed has cause for concern -- the company is not only safeguarding a wealth of U.S. government military information from external sources, it's also protecting its own valuable projects -- the F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter aircraft; the Aegis naval combat system; and the THAAD missile defense.

A U.S. Defense Department spokeswoman, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel April Cunningham told Reuters Saturday night that the risk from the breach was "minimal and we [the USAF] don't expect any adverse effect."

Lockheed Martin claims that no compromise of customer, program or employees' personal data occurred. The company has made similar claims about past breaches.

Now that the Pentagon is involved, if anything was stolen, it should be identified shortly.

IV. Who Attacked Lockheed Martin?

After the pressing issue of what was lost, perhaps the second most compelling question is who was behind the breach. Military officials and security staff at Lockheed are looking for clues in local time stamped information stored on the server and IP logs, trying to find out who accessed the compromised systems from where and when.

The problem is not easy as hackers commonly reroute their malicious traffic through multiple proxies, disguising their location. That said, given the nature of attack -- take down one of the world's top security firms and then use that information to compromise a top defense contractor -- involvement by a foreign government is suspected.

Lockheed posted a job listing last week requesting the services of a "lead computer forensic examiner". Requirements included someone who could "attack signatures, tactics, techniques and procedures associated with advanced threats" and "reverse engineer attacker encoding protocols." The cyber forensics expert's first task will likely be to try to pinpoint the identity of the attacker.

The most likely suspect is obviously China, with whom the U.S. government has been waging a "cyberwar" with for a decade now. China hires freelance hackers and maintains a large military force of official hackers as well. It uses this force to infiltrate international utilities, businesses, government servers, and defense contractors, looking for valuable information.

China has recently been testing a stealth jet, the J-20, which contains features curiously similar to those found on past Lockheed Martin designs. China insists, though, that it did not use stolen information to build its new weapon.

V. One Million Threats

Lockheed Martin's IT staff say they encounter 1 million "incidents" a day. They have to filter through these, distinguishing "white noise" from serious threats.

The Maryland data center from which information was taken is a state of the art facility, built in 2008. It covers 25,000 square-feet and cost $17M USD to build. But even with relatively modern systems and protections, defenses were still not strong enough to hold off the sophisticated and savvy attacker.

The company has a separate back-up data center in Denver, Colorado, which shares some of the company's contract workload. That center is not believed to have been breached in the intrusion.

Going ahead, Lockheed Martin will invariably face pressure from the U.S. Military and Congress to do a better job in making its systems breach-proof. But given the company's budget versus China's virtually blank check given to cyber security efforts, one has to wonder how much the company will be able to do with so little.

Sondra Barbour, the company's chief information officer, reminded employees in an email, "The fact is, in this new reality, we are a frequent target of adversaries around the world."_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Could our storecards replace the census? Plans unveiled to use data from shops, banks and estate agents
By STEVE DOUGHTY
Last updated at 8:54 AM on 19th October 2011

The historic national census is set to be abolished and replaced by information on everybody in the country gathered from banks, stores and estate agents.
The census – first carried out more than 200 years ago amid fears that the number of people in the country was multiplying too fast – has become expensive, inaccurate and slow, the Office for National Statistics admitted.
Instead, it proposed building a picture of the population and how people live through computer records, including databases built up by private sector organisations.
That means that in future information people hand over to banks, to retail chains through their storecards, to energy companies or to mobile phone firms could be bought by the state and used by Whitehall departments, councils and quangos.
The ONS gave its first official admission that the census is likely to go in a consultation paper on its future plans for counting the population called ‘Beyond 2011’.
The title suggests that the census carried out at a cost of £500 million earlier this year will be the last.
It said: ‘All of the signs are that the 2011 census operation has been highly successful but the census is becoming increasingly costly, and changes in society are making it more challenging to carry out.
‘A more mobile population, and the increasingly complex ways in which people live, make the process of census-taking more difficult, and the concept of a snapshot every 10 years less relevant.’

More...
7m caught in tax blunder: After a series of errors, 6m will get an average £400 rebate, while 1m face demand to pay £600
The paper added: ‘At the same time, improvements in technology and the growth of computerised records about people and services, both in the public and private sectors, seem to suggest a possible alternative approach.’
The Daily Mail revealed earlier this year that ONS officials had approached representatives of large private sector companies to test the possibility of getting their customer databases.
One organisation that took part in talks, the Demographic User Group, has members including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, the Co-op, Boots, the lottery operator Camelot, power giant E-ON, phone company Orange and, in the financial sector, Barclays and Nationwide.
All the companies have extensive records on customers, their families, where they live, what they buy, and even the way they use transport through petrol sales records.
Estate agencies have extensive computerised records of housing and rail and bus companies and airlines have customer ticketing records.

Historic: The census was first carried out more than 200 years ago amid fears that the number of people in the country was multiplying too fast
Private sector material could be combined with the vast databases produced in the public sector, including those of Revenue and Customs, Department of Work and Pension benefits records, NHS and GP rolls, the Valuation Office Agency which records details of homes for council tax valuation, and local councils.
These could provide material on ethnicity, migration and education that could be hard to deduce from private sector records.
The plan for the state to use information given both to public sector agencies and private firms for other purposes is certain to prove highly controversial.
It appears to clash with data protection rules, which may need sweeping reforms if the ONS is to cash in on private databases.
The consultation paper said that assessments of a new census system would take into account ‘public burden and public acceptability’.
Describing computer databases as ‘administrative data’, it added: ‘Although administrative data may be used extensively in future, any data held will be securely stored and tightly controlled so that only results for non-disclosive geographical areas are ever made available.’

Boots could also give away their customer database from storecards
The first national census was taken in 1801, at a time when politicians and intellectuals feared the population was growing too fast and that a revolution similar to the French upheaval could be inevitable.
It put the population of Britain and Ireland at just over 16 million.
Since then censuses have been held every 10 years, except in the wartime year of 1941.
The death knell for the national census sounded in 2001, when officials tried to give a precise count of the population but missed out a million people.
Population figures had to be manipulated for years afterwards to make up for the errors.
The ONS made its embarrassment worse when it tried to use the excuse that many young people were away on holiday in Ibiza on the day the census was taken. In fact enumerators were hampered by a badly-designed system for returning forms and the reluctance of large numbers of recent immigrants to take part.
This year’s census forms had 918 tick box options over 32 pages, demand details on everything from ethnic identity to how you travel to work and what kind of central heating you have, and booklets to help non-English or Welsh speakers understand them have been produced in 56 languages.
But more information still can be gleaned from storecards. Tesco cards alone are used by 15 million people._________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

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